Why “I’m Open to Anything” Isn’t Helping Your Job Search

Okay, I think it’s finally time for me to tackle the topic of Focus. Focus of your positioning to be specific. I haven’t written much about it before, probably because it feels so fundamental. Of course focus matters.

And yet, so many of my coaching conversations seem to end up there.

A senior leader is leaving corporate life and trying to build a consulting or fractional practice. Another is deep into a job search and wondering whether they should broaden it. Someone else is struggling to explain what they want next because, after 20 or 25 years, they can do a lot of things.

Eventually, some version of the same question comes up:

If I get too specific, am I going to miss out?

I understand the concern. When you don’t know where the next opportunity is coming from, narrowing anything can feel risky. So you start adding possibilities.

Senior Job Search Positioning: Why Focus Matters

I could do this, but I could also do that.

I’m open to different industries.

I’d consider a few kinds of roles.

I don’t want to limit myself.

It sounds sensible. Keep your options open and see what comes along.

But there’s a problem.

The more you try to tell people everything you can do, the harder it becomes for them to understand what to hire you for.

I saw this often during my years in executive search.

I would have introductory conversations with very accomplished senior executives and ask what sounded like a straightforward question:

“So, what are you looking for next?”

And then we’d go everywhere.

They could do this, but they’d also be open to that. They didn’t want to rule out a particular industry. They could see themselves in a large company, but something entrepreneurial might be interesting too. They’d done strategy, operations, transformation, commercial leadership and quite a bit more.

All of it might have been true.

The problem was that I would get off out of the meeting without a clear idea of what I should remember them for. So I would keep probing.

What do you really want to do? Where are you at your best? What kind of problem do you want to solve? What would make me think of you six months from now when the right search lands on my desk?

Sometimes it was surprisingly difficult to get to an answer.

From the search side, that mattered. I might have thought someone was impressive and enjoyed the conversation, but if I couldn’t easily place them in my mind, it was harder to bring them back to mind later when a relevant search came along.

I see the same thing now from the coaching side.

After a long career, being good at many things is rarely the problem.

Deciding what you want people to know you for now is much harder.

The Core Insight

When a company hires a senior executive, or a client brings in an experienced consultant, they usually have something fairly specific that needs attention.

The business may have outgrown its structure. A brand may have lost momentum. A founder may need an experienced operator alongside them. The company may be entering a new market or trying to fix something that isn’t working.

They have a problem in front of them, and they’re trying to work out who can help. That’s why a long list of capabilities doesn’t always help you as much as you think it does.

If you tell me you do strategy, transformation, operations, growth, leadership and organizational development, I know you’re experienced. I still may not know when to call you.

The same thing happens in a job search.

The person on the other side isn’t trying to understand the full scope of everything you have learned over 25 years. They are trying to work out whether your experience makes sense for the role they need to fill.

This is where senior leaders can get caught.

Your breadth is enormously valuable. In fact, it may be one of your greatest assets. And you’ve earned it. BUT there’s a difference between the breadth of your experience and the focus of your positioning.

You don’t need to squeeze your career into a tiny box or pretend you’ve only ever done one thing. You DO need to make it easier for someone to understand where you are especially useful.

That’s positioning.

It answers a fairly simple question:

Why you, for what?

Why We Resist Getting Specific

This sounds easy until it’s your own career.

Once you start getting specific, you also start leaving things out. And for someone who has spent decades building experience, that can feel uncomfortable.

But I also did THIS.

That was a huge part of my last role.

I don’t want people to think I can’t do that too.

So another skill gets added to the LinkedIn profile. Another possible role creeps into the introduction. The consulting proposition gets a little wider.

Before long, your positioning starts to read more like an inventory of your career than an argument for why someone should hire you.

There’s often fear underneath this too.

If you’re not sure where the next opportunity is coming from, being broad feels safer. Why rule anything out?

I’m not suggesting that you should.

You can be curious about opportunities that surprise you. You can change direction. You can have conversations outside the obvious lane. Careers rarely move in perfectly straight lines.

But your positioning still needs a center.

Being open to more than one possibility is different from asking the market to figure out what to do with you.

When You Really Need Something to Work

I also want to acknowledge something that gets lost in a lot of career advice.

Some people reading this are not calmly considering their options from a comfortable distance.

You may have been searching for months. You’ve sent applications, had promising conversations that went nowhere, made it to the final round and didn’t get the job. People you contacted never replied.

Maybe severance is running out, savings are getting uncomfortable, or you’re starting to wonder whether the market still values what you spent decades building.

If that’s where you are, advice about “narrowing your focus” can sound completely disconnected from reality. I hear that.

I’m not suggesting you turn down a conversation because it falls outside some perfectly defined career plan. I’m certainly not suggesting that focus will magically produce a job.

Sometimes you need to broaden the search. Sometimes you need to take work that isn’t exactly what you had in mind. Financial reality is financial reality.

But this is also where I think focus can give you something back. A job search contains an extraordinary number of things you cannot control.

You don’t decide when a company hires, whether a search gets put on hold, who else enters the process, whether an internal candidate appears, whether the budget changes or whether someone responds to your email.

You can do a very good job and still not get the outcome you wanted.

What you can control is the quality and consistency of what you put into the process.

How you talk about yourself is part of that.

So is the story your résumé tells. The way you introduce yourself in a networking conversation. How well you prepare when you finally get the interview. Whether you keep reaching out when a week has been discouraging. Whether you build relationships consistently instead of only contacting people when you need something. Whether you follow up, stay visible and ask for help.

And whether the people around you actually understand what you’re looking for.

That last piece matters more than most people realize.

If I say, “I’m looking for a senior leadership role, probably in consumer but I’m open to other sectors, and I could do general management, strategy, transformation or something more operational,” what exactly are you supposed to do with that information?

You may genuinely want to help me. But I haven’t given you much to work with.

A clearer message gives people something to remember and something to listen for. That matters even more when you need your network working with you.

The Courage Shift

For me, this is where the conversation about focus changes. It stops being an exercise in making yourself sound more marketable and becomes an exercise in deciding what you want to put forward.

After a long career, your challenge is not to squeeze every accomplishment into your story. It is to decide which parts of that experience matter most for where you want to go now.

That requires editing. And editing a career can feel strange because everything you’re leaving out is still true.

You may have run operations, built teams, led a turnaround, launched markets, managed a P&L, transformed an organization and sat on an executive committee. None of that disappears because you choose not to lead with all of it.

You’re simply deciding what belongs in the foreground.

I often come back to one question:

What do you want to be hired for now?

Not what could you do. Not what have you done at some point during your career. What do you want someone to call you about?

That question tends to change the conversation.

It also makes positioning much more personal. Two people with almost identical résumés may want very different things next. Their positioning should reflect that.

Practical Tools

So how do you actually get more focused?

Here are four exercises I use to get past the long list of everything you’ve done and closer to what you want people to remember.

1. Finish this sentence: “People usually call me when…”

Don’t start with your title or your skills. Start with the situation.

People usually call me when a business has grown quickly and needs more structure.

People call me when a brand has lost momentum and needs a reset.

People call me when there’s a complicated situation, lots of competing opinions and someone needs to find a way forward.

This gets you out of résumé language and into the problems you actually know how to solve.

2. Answer the question I used to ask in executive search.

Imagine we’ve just had a 30-minute conversation and I’m closing my notebook. What is the one thing you want me to remember about you six months from now?

Not five things. ONE.

If that feels almost impossible, pay attention. That may be exactly where your positioning needs work.

You’re not saying this is the only thing you can do. You’re deciding what you want to put in the foreground.

3. Give yourself the “Would someone know when to call me?” test.

Look at your LinkedIn headline, the first few lines of your About section, the top third of your résumé or your consulting website.

Then ask: If someone read only this, would they know when to call me?

“Experienced global executive with expertise across strategy, transformation, growth and operations” may all be true, but it leaves the reader with a lot of work to do.

The clearer you can make the connection between the problem, your experience and where you add value, the easier you are to remember.

4. Test your positioning on actual humans.

Don’t keep polishing it alone. Tell five people what you’re looking for and then ask them, a few minutes later:

“If you were introducing me to someone, how would you describe what I’m looking for?”

Listen carefully to what comes back.

If they can repeat the essence of it in their own words, you’re probably getting somewhere.

If they say, “Well, you could do lots of things…”, you may still be making them work too hard.

The goal isn’t to come up with the perfect elevator pitch. It’s much simpler than that. Help people understand what you want to be hired for, and make it easy for them to remember you when that opportunity appears.

The Courage Challenge

This week, pick one place where you position yourself.

Your LinkedIn headline. The top of your résumé. Your consulting proposition. Your website. Or simply the answer you give when someone asks what you’re looking for.

Read it as if you knew nothing else about yourself.

Would someone understand what you want to be hired for?

Would they know when to think of you?

If not, edit.

Take out some of the things that are true but not particularly useful. Bring forward the experience that matters for where you want to go. Make the problem you solve easier to see.

Then try it in real conversations.

You don’t need to get it perfect. Positioning gets sharper as you use it, hear yourself say it and see what people understand.

After a long career, you have plenty of experience to draw from. The work now is deciding what you want that experience to mean in the next part of your career.

That’s why being good at everything isn’t a strategy.

People need to know what to specifically remember you for.

And when so much about a job search or career transition sits outside your control, making that part as clear as you can is worth the effort.